7 December 2010

Grebbestad Church and Cemetery, Tanum, Sweden

If one could only be able to read the signature...

The Runehäll family grave.

I visited Tanum municipality and the idyllic localities Fjällbacka and Grebbestad in the middle of June this year, but the last couple of blog articles from this visit have been put on hold for some time.

Grebbestads kyrka (church), built from the Bohuslän red granite, was finished in 1892 and had the same architect as Fjällbacka Church, Adrian C. Peterson. The church has a rather large cemetery with many interesting monuments, but unfortunately - as can be seen from the photos above - not all the graves have been taken well care of.

2 comments:

Sometimes, cemeteries or city clerks have records or maps that indicate who is buried in each plot. Also, there are a variety of methods one can use to make a headstone more legible (you can find them using a search engine). However, some headstones are so worn that we will never know what they say.

Yes, I am sure there is an office in Tanum where the graves are recorded. I visited the place on a Sunday, so such an office would have been closed anyway. Many cemeteries have put up signs with maps of the most famous graves, but I guess that Grebbestad has not had that many celebrities. Still, graves of local politicians, merchants, authors and artists could be interesting nevertheless. Ebba Lindqvist surely was a local celebrity.

This blog is written by Dag T. Hoelseth, a Norwegian historian specialising in royal history.
I have a Cand.philol. degree in history from the University of Oslo and graduated in 1997 with the dissertation Det nasjonale kongedømme. Det norske monarkiet 1905-1910, which dealt with the royal election in Norway 1905 and how the new dynasty "became Norwegian".
I am the author of Historisk utredning om Kongehuset, dets apanasjer og disponible statseiendommer, which was published on behalf of the Palace Committee in 2001. The report focused among others on the history of the Norwegian civil list from 1905 to the 1970s as well as the properties the king of Norway has to his disposal.
I have made contributions to several antologies and also written articles for various publications. More often I have operated "behind the scene", consulting newspapers etc. with background information.
Among my other interests are genealogy, Norwegian-American emigration history, US presidential history, traveling, football and ice hockey.